Page:Arizona v. Navajo Nation.pdf/4

Rh

delivered the opinion of the Court.

In 1848, the United States won the Mexican-American War and acquired vast new territory from Mexico in what would become the American West. The Navajos lived within a discrete portion of that expansive and newly American territory. For the next two decades, however, the United States and the Navajos periodically waged war against one another. In 1868, the United States and the Navajos agreed to a peace treaty. In exchange for the Navajos’ promise not to engage in further war, the United States established a large reservation for the Navajos in their original homeland in the western United States. Under the 1868 treaty, the Navajo Reservation includes (among other things) the land, the minerals below the land’s surface, and the timber on the land, as well as the right to use needed water on the reservation.